Last Friday was the check in for the Aprils Smalls SAL as hosted by the wonderful Rachel this year - and I am definitely getting closer! For this SAL, I am stitching the Little Sheep Virtues series by LittleHouseNeedlewords this year, and in April I finished #5, Faith.
Now I am not quite sure why there is a giant carrot growing out of the roof of that house, but the little black sheep is very cute, don't you think?
Here we go for the April installment of Jo's Gifted Gorgeousness - as you might be able to tell, I'm getting caught up, with the distance between link up dates and my actual posting getting slightly shorter, haha.
I'm still working on my granny square baby blanket - getting a little antsy to get this one done as I have so many other babies I should start crafting for, but most of the things I'm planning to make should still be welcome once the litle ones are a couple months old, so as long as I can finish everything this year I should be fine.
For this month, I finished the last of the squares, wove in all the ends, and started joining them. I spent some time finding a pleasing layout, trying to create a bit of a colour gradient. I've now assembled the squares into three long stripes, so I can move them without using the layout, but they still need a ton more joins to make an actual blanket!
I've also had a new vacation start - I project I've been meaning to start for a while, as the yarn was a Christmas gift from my husband. But actually starting required casting on 509 stitches and that just seemed too daunting a task! Perfect to tackle when I had some more time, though, so I did and got the first 10 rows or so in. It's going to be a massive shawl, called Blanket to Go because that's basically what it is, but right now it looks like some green worm of sorts:
It's not all green, though - I did a little colour swatch before I started, to demonstrate the gradient I'm planning:
Probably going to take me a while for sheer size, but I'm looking forward to getting all the colours in there!
Hi, it's me! Still behind and still fighting my sewing machine, but slowly getting there. Today I am checking in (once again, very late) with Rachel's Fully Finished Gallery, where we attempt to do something with all these pieces lurking in our treasure chests and boxes of shame.
Last month I shared my struggles with finishing the second one of the Little Sheep Values. They have been continuing, but after some more sewing and unsewing and cutting and measuring I've come to a couple conclusions:
1) It's a bit of a curse that the first one I finished came out so neat and perfect because
2) I probably don't have the sewing skills yet to make 12 identical pillows and finally
3) I'm probably okay with that.
My first concession was to get some different kinds of lace - I didn't have enough of the original one for 12 pillows anyway - so they'd all look a little different because of that alone. Then, after I had sewn, frogged and resewn Courage just to discover it was still a bit wonky and I probably wouldn't be able to fix it cause I had made a mistake with cutting, I had a good long think and realized - it's okay. I finished Hope next, and for that one I had to do the centering of the stitched piece differently anyways because it has a big button right in the corner, and now that there are three (and not just one perfect and one wonky one) I'm feeling more at ease with them. I will continue to practice, but if in the meantime not everything comes out perfect, I will accept it - how else am I going to make progress? So here we have LSV #1, #2 (finished two months ago) and #4. I'll try to re-finish #3 Peace and #5 (which I am currently stitching) for next month.
April is halfway gone already (I know we are getting close to 2/3...but until then, we're going with halfway!) and I am still veeeery much behind on stuff around here...but I just came back from a very nice four day vacation and still got a week and a half of work, and I'm very motivate to get stuff done! In fact, most of the reason I am behind on stuff was putting in some extra time at work so I could get everything done in leave for two weeks with a clean concience. So we'll see what I can get done with all this time! (probably I now jinxed it and won't get anything done at all, but one can hope...)
Anyway, while it's a little late, here we go with my April WIPGO post...March was pretty successful, while I had some spil over into April to get all my goals done, it wasn't my WIPGO-goals, so all is well on that front ;)
For Guardian of Wayfarers, I added 1481 stitches in March. No backstitch this time as I realized I had a LOT more left to do in crosses! But I'm finally starting to see some 0s (colours with no stitches left), so that was pretty exciting. And in April, I might even get to stitch a bit on the actual dragon, so that's another exciting thing to look forward to!
My other project for March was Charming, a Dimensions Gold Petit kit I started some years ago. I put in 1639 stitches and look how close it is to a finish now! I finished the cat himself and made some progress on the cushion (or whatever that is) too. Just 1342 stitches left to go (plus some minimal backstitch that I don't have in Pattern Keeper, but it really isn't all that much!). So depending how the year goes, I might come back to finish it, or definitly do that next year - I'm starting to think 2025 might be a year of finishes again!
Now for April the numbers called were 18 and 21, so that means another rotation of Guardian of Wayfarers (that's working well so far!) and also Jacquie comes out to play:
This is the last panel that needs to be stitched, so half of part 7 and all of part 8. I'd say I *might* get a finish on this, but part 8 has a lot of stump work to do (four more of these wings!) and that takes a lot of time, so I'm not sure. At the very least, I will get close, though!
Here is the board for April - looking good so far!
Still in the process of catching up, both stitching and blog wise - and today I'm linking up the the Smalls SAL, hosted by Rachel this year. I started the 4th of the Little Sheep Values last weekend, and finally finished it yesterday! These stitch up really quickly once you get stuck in, and I really enjoy working on them.
April was Courage, and it's very pretty with the different greens and the purple. I'm really glad I'm finally stitching these this year - now my finishing just needs to catch up to my stitching!
Once again, I am on a mission to get caught up with...just about everything! I need to stitch things, read things, blog things...you know the drill, but work has been a bit crazy the last two weeks and I just haven't had as much time as I wanted, even with the long Easter weekend (most of which we spend with Felix' family). I'll get there though, you know I always do eventually!
So let's dive right into the question of the month - What colors – and brands – of floss do you love using? Do you have a particular color that you absolutely love? I love pretty much anything that isn' brown, tan or gray - nothing against the neutrals, but we use them a lot in stitching and they can get a bit boring! Bright colours though, or pastels...lovem. Especially the ones which are really soft colours, and really soft floss...you know the ones I'm talking about! Brandwise, I don't really have a favourite. I'm perfectly happy with good old DMC, love a good hand dyed, and silk...oh boy. Yes, I admit, I'm a flossaholic!
Now for actual stitching, again I made progress on The Lonelines of Autumn, my long time SAL with Rachel, the Ten Hour Stitcher! I didn't quite make my goal of one length a day, but still managed more stitches than in February when I did...it's all about how the colours work out, I guess! 1506 stitches added brought me to 84.29%, and 100,132 stitches finished - I have to say, hitting this 100k milestone felt like a big deal!
I also had another page finish up in the middle there - 8 down, many more to go (honestly, I didn't count)!
For the one a day challenge in March, I worked on Meadow Tablecloth, one of my oldest WIPs, and actually it took me just 11 days to finish it! Full picture coming up once it's had a wash an iron, but here is sneak peak in the mean time.
I decided to take the rest of the month off from the challenge, but had a look at my next oldest WIP, another table cloth, and it's actually less stitching than I remembered...so I might just pull that out for the next challenge month!
